The Queue: What did I miss?

I just got back from vacation yesterday. My body is super mad because it got used to having 8 hours of sleep a night. It took me three tries to log into the Blizzard Watch CMS, I don’t have any milk for my coffee, and I need to figure out all the stuff that was announced while I was away. Luckily, I know just the site to catch up with.

This is the Queue, where you ask us questions and we provide the answers. Hopefully.

Wait, there’s a bee mount now?

I’m torn. In theory a bee mount would be adorable! In practice it’s a little too much antennae and segmented eyeballs for me. Bees, like spiders, are an important part of our ecosystem and I do my best to usher them outdoors rather than squishing them, but that doesn’t mean I want to hug them. Blurg.

However, since I’m sure everyone’s going to be riding it I may as well embrace it. Not literally. Blurg.

Somebody got World First Mythic Azshara down? Cool.

It varies, but most of the higher-end raiders do have some form of presence on Twitter, Twitch, Instagram, etc. Maintaining that can take a good amount of work, especially as far as Twitch goes. Lots of raiders share other pastimes there as well. Sco, the raid leader of Method, does fitness-related streams occasionally, for instance. There are a lot of content opportunities like tutorials too.

In terms of in-game stuff, they frequently do things like selling runs which is a surprisingly good way to keep sharp. If you’re doing a run with, say, 15 of your regular raiders and 10 question marks, can you pull it out if all 10 of those random people die instantly? Can you work around it? Can you find new ways to excel?

Also, in these guilds lots of people maintain “alts” at high levels just in case they find out mid-attempts that the best way to go is with 9 Mages or no Druids or whatever, and they can swap on the fly. Though they can organize runs very efficiently, gearing a full stable to get ready for next time is going to require quite a bit of time. In the gearing-up stages we’ll also see them farming their faces off for consumables — though they likely won’t have to go out and actually pick the herbs themselves. Selling runs helps bankroll big auction house buys for all the potions they’ll be chugging like water.

I haven’t run it myself so I can’t confirm with 100% certainty, but I know that was the speculation during the PTR. It appears to be confirmed that all three spawn in the first wing of LFR, too! Just hang out after the instance is over.

I know there are several available in the Mechagon dungeon as well.

Firelands Timewalking is coming in patch 8.2.5? Huh.

Honestly I think both restrictions on Tarecgosa are anti-fun, but then I feel that way about a whole lot of the current restrictions like that. I understand that they put forward a relatively reasonable explanation for why they don’t want legendaries to be transmogged, but it still feels bad, man. It essentially feels like a punishment, since you’re then all-but forced to take up a bag slot with it for all eternity because of course I’m going to carry around my big angry dragon mount/staff. Congrats on the achievement! Here, choose between that and another slot for anchor weed.

I am super biased here though, because I’d really love to use my Justicar and Lieutenant Commander titles but I don’t play that character anymore so I can’t. It was one of the most grueling slogs I did in the game and I’m not about to do it again for a title, but I earned it — much like people doing those legendaries in current content.

I can empathize.

First of all, welcome back, and by necessity this response will be lightly spoilery.

Luckily, as a Demon Hunter as you increase your item level, you should theoretically be able to go back and solo raids soon, if not already. Also, the majority of story beats took place in quests. Though some of the full resolutions went through raids, you can mostly infer what happened in between.

However, most of those quest lines were long and spanned full zones — the quest through your Order Hall, for instance. There were also a few weird instances where things happened but only in one specific Order Hall. They weren’t crucial to the overall Burning Legion, etc, demons and other nonsense major arc, but they did reveal a few things you wouldn’t know about otherwise. As an example, one of my favorite characters was Amber Kearnen, who was a badass spy high in the ranks of s7, and sent Alliance Rogues on a few quests even way back when. I wondered why she wasn’t hanging out with Sully like always, until I finally got around to leveling my Rogue. Lo and behold, my girl got got in the lowbie levels in the Rogue Order Hall. That was essentially how you found out — oh look, she dead.

A couple of the Order Halls were like that — I still need to check out what in the sam hill happened in the Death Knight one for myself.

The major story bits you need to know were mostly played out in quests, though.